mandarine

I was trying to prepare a short post on what I thought was a clue to the ‘natural’ diet of humans. But before I started writing, I had to find documentation to back up my claims. As often, I started out with a small idea which I believed was original, and the internet opened up monumental double-doors to a gigantic library where thousands of people were discussing the very same idea and scores of other similar ideas, and had been doing so for a very long time, so that all I could do was listen (read) before talking (writing my post).

My small idea

If I was left without fire nor kitchen appliances and I had to choose between:

• a basket with raw peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, wheat grain, carrots, spinach, lettuce, and onions,
• a cage with a live duck or rabbit, a raw egg, juicy wriggling woodworms, and hopping grasshoppers,

I would probably turn a vegetarian on the spot. There is no way you can make me kill a duck with my bare hands and then tear bits of raw flesh apart with my teeth. The best I could do would probably be the egg, the worms and the crickets.

From there, I decided that without fire, humans are psychologically vegetarians. A hot steak straight from the barbecue is yummy, but a warm steak straight from the antelope is yucky.

But I am supposed to have a scientific mind, therefore I must doubt everything — starting with everything I say, because there is a very strong subjective bias.

What I found on the internet

[more]

Unsorted considerations about pencasting.

Pros:

Pencasting

• gives a personal touch but is still much less personal than podcasting and infinitely less than video-casting
• requires much less bandwidth than podcasting
• protects what you write from content theft
• keeps content more private, as it is not searchable — you can use taboo keywords without fear of invasion by Google-misled mobs (see cons)
• makes it much harder to include hyperlinks (some may try image maps).
• requires fewer multimedia skills than podcasting (some may think otherwise)
• makes readers feel as if you were sending them letters
• makes you feel as if you were sending letters to your readers
• offers you an analog hardcopy of what you publish, whatever happens to your hosting provider or your computer

[more]

That’s it: Charlotte and healingmagichands have convinced me that I should enlist for NaBloPoMo. However, I am certain it would take too much time if I had to write a deep philosophical post every day. So I will not be doing the daily posting here on Mandarine, but on my other blog, the one with the weird inventions, with which I have had difficulties keeping up recently. In fact, absidea is not really a blog. It is more of an irregular serialized book.

Hence I am not sure which one I should really choose between NaBloPoMo or NaNoWriMo. Anyway, NaBloPoMo it will be; I will be posting the thirty ideas for absidea Season 2 over the thirty days of November.

Then the blog will hibernate until I write Season 3. Well, not entirely. As illustrations take me an awful lot of time, I will skip them for the daily November postings. Then I’ll take the next twelve months to update the articles with the illustrations, bringing each newly illustrated post to the top of the stack in turn.

There it goes. As a teaser, here are a few of the absurd ideas that you’ll be reading about over at absidea in November:

• 03 Nov Space mirrors that look into the past
• 05 Nov The cheese-jet pizza printer
• 11 Nov N-dimensional tic-tac-toe
• 12 Nov Autobuilt underwater coral cities
• 16 Nov Placebotherapy
• 19 Nov A tall fence against global warming
• 24 Nov The co-sleeping hammock

If you are not acquainted with absidea, feel free to try before November.

[more]

I’ve been having tons of work recently, leaving me hardly any time to write. But I still have a minute to stop, take a picture, and meditate. I need to take the picture before I can meditate, otherwise, I am always thinking about light, angles, frames, colors.

This was Friday evening, as we escaped to celebrate our eleventh anniversary. Maybe I’ll show you more pictures of the beautiful place.

I should be going back to a normal writing pattern by the end of the week.

I cannot remember when it started. Maybe the turning point was shortly after I started on my first job eleven years ago, when I explicitly told my wife that although I had one of the most prestigious degrees in France, I would not go for the associated prestigious careers. Instead of using my position to get the highest paychecks, I’d be using it to get the best quality of life possible.

[more]